Access
to the king's justice through petition
was not restricted to exalted social classes or to the educated clergy.
Those who were unable to write their petitions for themselves must have
had access to scribes
who could produce an appropriately formal and legible hand,
and who also knew the acceptable formulae. It is likely that some were
penned in the chancery
itself by the clerks who knew the system. Certainly most are written in
a form of neat document
hand that historians refer to as chancery
hand and the spelling, although variable, is confined within certain parameters which exclude some regional dialect variations. Petitions which were presented in the chancery court were rewritten by chancery scribes in the correct handwriting, formula and acceptable spelling, and it is most likely these that largely survive in the records. Paleographers
may dispute whether such hands were entirely confined to the chancery,
or whether there were scribes out in the towns who had the skills to reproduce
the same code.

Segment
from a petition of 1440 (National Archives, S.C.9/93/4644). By permission
of the National Archives.

The
above sample identifies the petitioners as Nicolas Brempdon, Richard Estdon
and William Estdon, staynours, or tin miners.
The neat document hand of their petition must have been produced by a
professional scribe, either from the chancery or trained in their system.

Nevertheless,
it must not have necessarily been compulsory to follow a prescribed style
sheet in order to have access to the system. The following example is
written in a very crude and messy hand. Furthermore, the spelling is eccentric
even by 15th century standards, and it does not conform to the standard
formula.

This
is a segment from a petition (National Archives E.28/76/32) of 1445-6
. By permission of the National Archives.

The
petition above, from one Richard Mountfort, complains that one Thomas Burdette
has made several attempts upon his life.It is written in what can only be described as an ordinary cursive hand. There
is no address to the king, and no meek beseechings as the document launches
into a wordy account of the petitioner's misfortunes. Words have been
crossed out and rewritten above in several places. One might imagine a
local parish priest with dubious literacy struggling away with this one.
But then, one is not supposed to imagine things about historical evidence,
is one?

In
general, these documents were not highly decorative, the emphasis being
on a neat, legible hand that did not distract from the business under
consideration. The only calligraphic
extravagance appears to be the occasional production of fanciful and curly
capital letters of rather spidery form at the head of the document.

Two
elaborate capitals on petitions (National Archives, E.28/60/38 and
E.28/79/30). By permission of the National Archives.

It
is also interesting that the script used to annotate the petition in the chancery was generally a cursive of rather different form to the bastarda
style which was commonly used for the petition itself. This is not just
a case of a different scribe, but probably of a sense of appropriateness
of different script styles for different purposes. The bastarda or so-called
chancery hand of the body of the petition being a somewhat ceremonial
script, while the cursive of the annotation was the honest hardworking
business hand of a bureaucrat.

The
end of the petition and the beginning of the annotation in the Christchurch
petition which has been featured here (National Archives, E.28/60/38)
By permission of the National Archives.

Petitions
were not copied on to rolls
in the chancery. The surviving evidence is in the form of thousands of
small pieces of parchment,
the original petitions themselves, now archived in the National Archives
in London. Heaven knows how incomplete the record is, given the propensity
for small bits of parchment to lose themselves over the centuries. Nevertheless,
they have the potential to provide an important insight into the late
medieval legal process. A Tillotson of my acquaintance actually wrote
a huge PhD thesis about them, and maybe now that he has retired from teaching
undergraduates he might even write a book about them, but I doubt it.

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Dianne Tillotson, freelance researcher and compulsive multimedia and
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for copyright status and usage before you start making free with it. This page last modified 13/3/2008.